Séan-tific Femininity

From Science of the Seance: Transnational Networks and Gendered Bodies in the Study of Psychic Phenomena, 1918–40. Published by UBC Press in 2016.

Despite enormous gains by feminists in opening up scientific and medical professions to women from the late nineteenth century onward, femininity continued to be associated with intellectual ineptitude. Women, still defined largely by their bodies rather than by their minds, were assumed to be incapable of the rationalism necessary for scientific pursuits.

In attempting to construct and portray psychical investigations as a science, researchers enacted boundary-making practices that fell along gendered lines. The scientific self envisioned as explicitly male became the standard of a credible investigator. Nevertheless, numerous women attempted to conduct psychical investigations in apparent contradiction to the masculine image of the scientific identity. Yet these women did so only within certain bounds and commonly evoked not their own authority to observe and collect reliable data but the expertise of scientific men.

Lillian Hamilton, T. Glen Hamilton’s wife, went to great lengths to support her husband’s research and became instrumental in compelling him to continue his investigations of the paranormal. It was she who began to hold sittings with the medium Elizabeth Poole—the woman who would act as the main medium for the Winnipeg experiments for several years following. Although T. Glen had begun experiments with telepathy in 1918, he had decided to give it up, partly due to professional commitments but also for fear that psychical research may be “a dangerous business” that he would be best to avoid. Thus, even when prodded, he resisted dabbling in such practices for a time. Lillian, in contrast, was not to be dissuaded once her interest was “aroused in the possibilities” of such experiments.

Lillian Hamilton continued holding sittings, determined to discover something of value, and in July 1921 her expectations were met. At this time, she observed that when Poole placed her hands on the seance table, it began to tilt on two legs, the other side levitating and offering due resistance against efforts to push it down. “What was holding it in place?” Lillian Hamilton asked rhetorically. “Having recently read Dr. Crawford’s account of the telekinetic phenomena which he had obtained with Miss Goligher in Belfast, I jumped to the conclusion that in Elizabeth we had perhaps discovered a medium with potential of the same type.” Lillian Hamilton recorded this significant seance on July 24, 1921, in short staccato phrases reminiscent of a scientific report: “Mrs. Poole and Lillian H. present. They place their hands on the table. In a few moments the ‘power’ is exceedingly strong—the table tilts on two legs ... L.H. tried to depress it back to the floor but found the table seemed to be resting on a sort of ‘air cushion.’”

Despite the promising experiment, Lillian Hamilton met with difficulties when she attempted to pursue and present these psychical experiments to others. Her struggles with being recognized as a scientific experimenter came first of all from her husband. T. Glen Hamilton did not initially believe the account of his wife or the medium. Drawing attention to his wife’s body, which he assumed could easily lead her feminine mind astray, he suggested that “probably the ‘force’ was due to unconscious muscular activity.” He remained unconvinced until he experienced first-hand such extraordinary powers. On July 31, 1921, T. Glen relented to Lillian’s urgings, and they held a seance in which table tilting again occurred. T. Glen was unable to push the table back down in place due to the incredible force. Perhaps unsurprising, the recorder of the seance, Lillian, reported that she “was very much amused to hear TGH ‘grunting’ ... as he struggled with the table to push it down.”

After this experiment, T. Glen Hamilton finally viewed Poole’s mediumistic gifts as potentially valuable. Tellingly, only once he himself had experienced the phenomenon was he “convinced for the first time of the reality of psychic force,” which he thus deemed worthy of his scientific investigation. A drive to “know the facts of psychical manifestation for one’s self ” undoubtedly reflected the individualist ideals of his interwar context. Yet it also made Lillian Hamilton merely incidental to his own interests in the paranormal.

Feminist thinker and physicist Evelyn Fox Keller identifies a powerful mythology embedded within the modern scientific enterprise that has cast women as “the guarantors and protectors of the personal, the emotional, the particular.” Meanwhile, “science—the province par excellence of the impersonal, the rational and the general—has been the preserve of men.” In the process of adopting a scientific framework through which to investigate the paranormal, psychical researchers espoused a similarly gendered division of knowledge. T. Glen Hamilton did value the work of his wife and other female participants in his psychical experiments and, by all appearances, enjoyed conversing with women and communicating to them the methods of his research and results. Yet despite his favourable opinion of women, he did not align them with critical reasoning and experimental methods. He insisted, rather, that women’s “psychology is different” from that of men. According to Hamilton, women, unlike men, were innately trusting, emotional, uncritical, and “more disposed to accept with less demand for fundamental detail.”

Women, in some instances, seemed to adopt this characterization. As much as Lillian Hamilton articulated a sincere dedication to the scientific method, she also conveyed a much more subjective side to the investigations than did her husband. Whereas T. Glen Hamilton insisted upon his objectivity and unsentimental approach, Lillian freely admitted that the psychical investigations of both herself and her husband had led her to the conviction that “the problem was settled: religious faith in survival no longer walked alone.” Expressing her desire for faith alongside her scientific persuasions, she embraced the close links between women and spirituality that several historians have identified. According to Lillian, her spiritual belief “went hand in hand with evidence of a scientific nature.” This revelation comforted Lillian, who immediately viewed it in light of the loss of her young son Arthur only a few years before: “A new world had opened up—a world of belief that helped me part with Arthur without tears and with an inner joy that one of my beloved at least was safely over and ready for other-world evolutionary endeavours.” The connection she drew between these investigations and her dead son was far from unfounded, as apparently the ghost of their child made frequent appearances in Poole’s visions, through which she described him “as increasing in age and stature.”

Lillian Hamilton adhered to scientific empiricism much like her husband, but she did not equate her dedication to empiricism with an inability to express grief and hope. T. Glen Hamilton did not admit to such emotion, at least in public, quite possibly out of fear that he would lose legitimacy as an appropriately manly and rational investigator. Seen in this light, the ideal of masculine scientific authority constrained him as well as Lillian. T. Glen may have felt prohibited from communicating his grief over the loss of his son or the hope that his experiments provided. Lillian’s manner of forging her identity and perspective provided a degree of flexibility and dynamism that her husband could not afford. Nevertheless, it also safely placed her within the confines of ideal domesticity, motherhood, and respectable, middle-class femininity.

Whereas T. Glen Hamilton experienced significant recognition as a scientific investigator, Lillian Hamilton found herself positioned as irrevocably tied to supposed qualities of womanhood, such as impressionability, irrationality, and emotionalism. She consequently remained unable to fully assume the position of a credible investigator in her own right, despite her invaluable service as a researcher, recorder, witness, and experimenter in the Winnipeg seances. Unlike her husband, Lillian remained defined by her “naturally subjective” knowledge and embodiment. Much as feminist theorist Lorraine Code argues, she could therefore never attain the status of “a knower in the fullest sense of the term.”

Lillian continued to experiment for years after the death of her husband. Yet, even when she acted independently, her investigations never received the recognition that his experiments had. Her role, at best, paralleled what Steven Shapin refers to as an “invisible technician”—an essential yet virtually unrecognized agent in the context of the psychical laboratory.